Favorites: Bottles, Benchmarks, Bureaucrats
August 11, 2025 — China exit-bans a U.S. child, AI fakes nudge readers back to mainstream news, and RFK Jr. halts mRNA cancer work
To be fair, I think the slapper just agitates them to get them to go into the little slots. The component that then flips only the ones that are upside down is actually more impressive.
The API gives the ability to switch between models, and it seems to nicely streamline naming. However, the UI doesn't give you this control, you're really just GPT5 with or without reasoning, pretty annoying. Mollick called it a Weird move (cached). GPT-5 does better on a lot of benchmarks, but there are still plenty that it's not #1 on. Folks on the OpenAI subreddit are distinctly unimpressed (cached). Somehow Bill Gates argued GPT-5 wasn't going to be impressive back in late 2023 (cached)!
There was some disagreement when sama posted that about who OpenAI is in that metaphor, but now that we have some benchmark results...
Longer Reads
• After Yglesias brought up how difficult it is to build nice downtowns due to *positive* externalities. Sadly he gave few specific prescriptions for what cities should do about this. But Elmendorf stepped in with exactly that, including some proposed state laws that could help. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– China definitely is running influence operations on social media, and it's not that hard to spot them sometimes. (src)(cached)
– China has placed an exit ban on a seven-year-old US Child. (src)(cached)
– There's a startup that is now manufacturing butter directly, without any dairy products. (src)(cached)
– Actor whose Japanese grandparents were imprisoned at an internment camp during WWII is saying that he wants to join ICE. And, huh, is that Dean Cain? (src)(cached)
– An unexpected outcome from the triumph of DeepMind's AlphaGo is that suddenly top Japanese players can suddenly get plenty of practice, and now they're rising in the rankings. (src)(cached)
– Asking Claude AI to "De-Carcinize the Great Gatsby". It uh, it sure did that. (src)(cached)
– A robotic DoorDash might not be able to navigate from the sidewalk to your door, but if it’s a tenth the price, people will be willing to walk out to the street, argues Tim Lee. (src)(cached)
– It's surprising that more rich rightists aren't annoyed that RFK Jr has set back cancer research significantly by blocking mRNA cancer research. That hits everyone, and it's really bad (cached). (src)(cached)
– Apparently farm households in the US make more money than the median, but it’s almost entirely due to off-farm income, per US Agriculture Department. Possible that there are a lot of people who are doing just enough farming to get preferential tax treatment. (src)(cached)
– Trump admin has reached a deal with Nvidia to allow export of AI training chips to China in return for them paying a portion to the US government. Sorta seems like this constitutes an export tax (cached), which would make it explicitly constitutionally prohibited (cached). Per Ben Thompson's argument, I'm not sure it’s actually a good idea to have export controls on AI training chips at all, but setting them aside over such a tiny amount of money is dumb (cached). (src)(cached)
– There’s a new shortest-path algorithm, Dijkstra’s O(n log(n)) is no longer fastest. A new algorithm has been found that’s just O(m log^(2/3) n) (src)(cached)
– Zuck got in trouble for running a small private school in their residence. Palo Alto says it's against the city code, but the fact is, California passed regulations to make it possible to operate small childcare in residentially zoned neighborhoods, it's clear the city code violates state law. (src)(cached)
– Interesting experiment seems to show that as people learn more about how realistic modern fake AI images can be, they become more interested in mainstream news sources. (src)(cached)
– Democratic party seems to be turning against labor unions, and the teamster union in particular. (src)(cached)
– Trump says nonsense all the time, but I just wanted to note that he seems to be saying Alaska is part of Russia. (src)(cached)